By ABC News
Publication Date: 2025-12-12 04:09:00
The heirs of an elderly American woman are suing OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming ChatGPT encouraged a mentally ill man to kill his mother and himself.
Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former technology industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, 83, and died by suicide in August at their home in Connecticut.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in California by Adams’ estate, accuses OpenAI of “developing and distributing a defective product that confirms a user’s paranoid delusions about his own mother.”
It’s one of a growing number of wrongful death lawsuits against AI chatbot makers across the country.
“During this…
